RE: [Aimmath-developers] APPROVAL: multiple AiM installations

[Greg G. <gr...@ma...>]

On Monday, 14 July 2003 12:37 AM, Gustav wrote:
> I find it extremely useful to have several different AiM installations
> running on my server. For example I have one in directory "AIM"
> which is my production version and another one in "develop" which
> is the version I test modifications on. Tomcat has no difficulties
> with multiple installations, it even finds them automatically as
> soon as there is a web.xml file in the
> corresponding web-inf directory.

Hi Gustav,

To date I haven't used this idea ... I'm not exactly clear on what
you do. I suppose the relevant change for the web.xml in the "AIM"
directory is to globally substitute AIM for ROOT.

And you would do the same in server.xml if you only ever have one of
the development version or the production version going at any one time.

However, I got the feeling that you were saying you could have the two going
simultaneously, in which case server.xml would need to be
changed more substantially ... a different server port? or do
you only need to copy the `<Context path=...' line and give
a different value for path which will appear in the URL?

> Unfortunately currently the file Servlet.mpl has a section that
> overwrites Tomcat's server.xml file. After that AiM will only run
> in the root directory and not any other. There is as far as I can
> see no reason whatsoever to overwrite Tomcat's server.xml file.
> Does anyone know a reason for it?

There are a few things in the configuration process that are unnecessary. I
think when Neil wrote it, he only envisaged that
someone would do it once. Tomcat has a default server.xml which
does need to be overwritten, but as you say once it's been done and
customised further it need not be overwritten again. I would like
Neil to write some documentation about what gets written where with
explanations for administrators ... I'm not sure I completely understand it
yet. I had trouble when doing an upgrade early on such that I
didn't have an admin. password and couldn't use the admin.html page to
add one and found myself installing from scratch. Perhaps the latest changes
to aim/Admin.mpl have fixed the problem I faced.

> So I will commit a modified Servlet.mpl in which the section
> overwriting the server is commented out. At the same time I will
> also commit an updated ManualConfig.dist. Unless I hear objections
> from you of course.

No objection from me. We can also back up to the earlier version if
necessary. The beauty of CVS.

  Regards,
  Greg